I gave this book 4 other tries, but every time it fell out of my hands after barely five minutes. The main narrative isn't that interesting, and the "grandparents" ones (I haven't even been able to finish the third one) managed to make me, who usually like stream of consciousness writing, cringe in frustration. It's a shame, because the themes themselves could've been great; only the execution is lacking.

Before anyone decides to harp at me because I'm "criticizing the 09/11 events": I'm not. Actually, I really wanted to like this book, with its potential to tell a gripping, emotional story, I was eager to start it, and there's a part of me that still wants to read that story, to see where it could have been brought to. I can't even say I disliked the characters (although, gifted child or not, Oskar doesn't sound very believable to me for a supposedly 9-year-old narrator.) My peeves are mostly with the writing, with the disjointed and jumbling style, and with the author resorting to 'witty' punctuation and other blank pages tricks. Great things can be done with disjointed narratives that gather at the end and leave you astonished; however, it's a hard feat to perform, and the reader must still be kept hooked throughout the story—not dragged along in the hopes that "it will get better at some point." I really tried; this said, a whole third of the book, more specifically, 125 pages out of 326, seem at least fifty pages too many to simply "get into the story".